The past few weeks I've been trying to find myself a new laptop. I've wanted something that was lightweight, thin, multi-core, 64 bit, SSD drive and a powerful graphics card. Basically, I wanted to have everything and give up nothing. Needless to say the search has been difficult.

I'm not really much of a hardware guy either so I tend to pick the whatever has the highest spec numbers and the lowest cost - not really a good indicator of laptop quality. However, in the process I came across a really good resource for getting laptop information.

NotebookCheck.com was a great resource for not only laptop information but for graphics accelerator information as well. Most of the summaries of graphics cards focused on quality settings and frame rates for popular video games -- that's a metric even I can understand!

After a lot of searching I finally found a laptop that seemed perfect Just check out these specs -- all for $899.00.

Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit

CPU Type: Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53 GHz

Screen: 16.4

Memory Size: 4GB DDR2

Hard Disk: 320GB

Optical Drive: Dual Layer DVD Burner

Graphics Card; ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 (1GB)

Dimensions: 15.1" x 10.3" x 1.14-1.46"

Weight: 6.9 lbs

But wait... did you see that? The USB ports? On... the... front... RIGHT?? That will be nice to have a bunch of cords sticking out right where I'm trying to use my mouse. In fact, if you zoom in closer you can see they even mislabeled the ports!